


janus

by gay_writes_with_mac



Series: Mac Poetry [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Blood, Existential Crisis, Gen, I got existential on main, Poetry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-18
Updated: 2020-11-18
Packaged: 2021-03-09 21:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 347
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27612764
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gay_writes_with_mac/pseuds/gay_writes_with_mac
Summary: If you strip away everything that was ever laid on you by another person, what's left? What remains inside the shell of expectations?
Series: Mac Poetry [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2018834
Kudos: 1





	janus

in my purest, ugliest, dirtiest, truest form,

what am i?

what lies underneath one month shy of eighteen years of expectations,

stacked neatly like bricks to erect the gothic cathedral that hosts the ghost of my soul,

one stone at a time, i have been locked away,

encased like a corpse in a personalized catacomb,

and who i am and what i could have been is nothing but a shadow,

flitting about in the darkened corridors and the empty hallways of the prison built brick by tiny brick around me,

and the soul that lives inside hardly lives at all,

a shriveled, withered face, an embalmed scooped-out cadaver that never lived long enough to die,

barely a whisper of a life that i will never live a single moment of,

the slow and quiet first and dying breath of a creature that is nearly almost me.

i shovel aside the bricks,

dig and scrabble and scrape until my outstretched hands are nothing but a mess of blood and filth,

and as my crimson blood drips down to stain the stones of expectations,

i am not an inch closer than i was before i paid her gory ransom.

her jaws snap and salivate, her curled, arthritic hands stretching greedily out into the sunlight,

and she demands ever more from me, ever more and ever more,

drop after drop after gallon of my blood,

until those precious rays warm her face and she sucks in her first breath and her heart at long last jolts with the quiver of a shaky beat

and the shell built of stones forced upon me disintegrates at last into the dust,

and the haunted, starving, groping, beautiful thing that i have always truly been staggers out,

and drags this sinking ship from the grasping claws of my storm.

and i want to set her free,

to throw myself that round and red-ringed lifesaver,

but the bounty i have set upon my own head grows ever higher by the second,

the tang of iron stains my tongue

and i have only so much blood.


End file.
